Bee Bee Sea – Stanzini Can Be Allright

Yes, a full five stars right out of the blocks for this mind-melting maelstrom of Italian garage punk. Don’t be fooled by the determinedly lo-fi approach: this is a band underplaying just how magnificent they are and wrapping up their idiosyncrasy in musical trickery and sleight of hand. It all sounds very dreamy and simple. It’s not. There’s a lot going on here, and most of it is gorgeous. What isn’t gorgeous is unsettling and dreamy, reflecting, perhaps, their provenance, a band from nowhere you have heard of channelling a universal mood of dissatisfaction. There’s ennui here, there’s great beauty and a steel core that all melds to create a quite unique and engaging landscape. And Bee Bee Sea can rock and thunder with a swagger that leaves you in no doubt that they’re a band with an excess of balls and a healthy disregard for mainstream pap or the Punk clown nostalgia show.

Opener Holy Money puts T Rex and The Fall into some kind of unholy blender to create a rollicking castigation of materialism. From this point on, it’s a frantic joyride that occasionally drifts into a blissful psychedelic eddy (Memories of Another Life, Angels In Church) or a helter skelter dash (You). Centrepiece of this work is a trilogy of pieces (It’s All About The Slow Music / It’s All About The Music / It’s All About The Fast Music) which is a kind of musical and lyrical manifesto, underlining their philosophy about authenticity and fakery (“When there’s no good shit around you better form a band!” is the band’s strapline).

Don’t be sucked in by the angularity, the megaphone vocal. This is blissfully tuneful and unsettling stuff, brutally lo-fi and utterly individual. This is a band that deserves every plaudit they receive. Vital and necessary. Bee Bee Sea should be on every playlist going because, well, because they just should. They came here from nowhere. Let’s not send them straight back there.

Stanzini Can be Allright by Bee Bee Sea is out now on Wild Honey Records.